Tuesday 19 August 2008 13.30 EDT
First published on Tuesday 19 August 2008 13.30 EDT

Serious-minded MPs stay out of the silly season by going on holiday, nurturing the constituency or clearing off to the Edinburgh Festival. That's what I was doing until I picked up the Sunday Times. Normally I throw the paper away and keep the Culture section but, being on holiday, I read David Cameron's article about the Georgian incursion into South Ossetia. Lights, camera, action: cue David. The Tory leader is suddenly among the Georgians. This modern-day Metternich has a plan. Georgia's leaders are probably not used to dealing with Conservative politicians, and they seem to have taken his encouragement at face value. They shouldn't.

As told to the readers of the Times, the Tory Talleyrand's plan has three elements. We must all condemn Russia, there must be "urgent diplomatic efforts", and the Russians must be punished. The first and the third points don't sound to me like a very promising start to the "urgent diplomatic efforts".

Cameron urges Nato to admit Georgia. Nato is a mutual defence pact. This position will have gone down very well in Tbilisi, but do we really mean to commit ourselves to all-out war against the Russian Federation if something like this happens again? I don't favour that approach, and I don't know anyone who does. There is a bigger point here. If western hawks really are advocating Nato membership for every small country that borders the Russian Federation, even a government far more charitably disposed towards Nato than the present Russian one is going to see the move as a direct challenge. Constantly reprimanding the Russians isn't the right way to deal with this problem. It makes us look pompous and ineffective.

Dave does have one sanction to advocate. The Bullingdon Bismarck is going to ban Russians from shopping at (or, as he puts it, "marching into") Selfridges. Perhaps he thinks they are going to annex it. And why pick on Selfridges? Is it all right for them to shop at Woolworths? As a foreign policy, this is ludicrous. Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev are unlikely to back down because they have been banned from shopping trips to London department stores. Poor old Yuri Fedotov, Russia's ambassador to the UK, will be inundated with requests for Selfridge's branded goods every time he goes back to Moscow. The Russian cabinet will meet with little teddy bears wearing Selfridges T-shirts decorating the table. Will they be frightened of dangerous Dave? They are more likely to laugh.

There are serious issues in all of this, most of which were missed in Dave's article. Much has been made of the Russian overreaction and the need for the Russians to leave Georgia and for Georgia's sovereignty to be maintained. But there are two other overreactions which deserve rather more coverage and discussion than they've received so far. The first is the original reason why Georgian troops were sent into South Ossetia. Why did they do this, and why were they killing people? The Russian allegation is that the Georgians wanted the land but not the people, and were attempting something pretty close to ethnic cleansing. I would like to hear testimony from the South Ossetians and to see an independent assessment of what exactly was going on. If these were the circumstances, would it be reasonable (let alone likely) for the Russians to stand by and do nothing?

This brings me to the second overreaction, which is Cameron's one-sided condemnation of Russia. The Tory leader showed no acknowledgement of the context or the history of the issue. Rightwing leaders in France and Germany are taking a more thoughtful approach, without being soft.

So it's bad luck for Georgia that publicity-seeking Dave was holidaying next door in Turkey when the trouble started and not in Cornwall, as the British newspapers might have led them to believe.